Microsoft: No Plans to Integrate Desktop Search into OS

During a panel about search at the Harvard Business School Cyberposium, Mark Kroese, general manager of information services and merchant platform product marketing for MSN, told the audience that MS doesn't plan to integrate desktop search in the operating system.

"'...there's no immediate plan to do that as far as I know,' Kroese said. 'That would have to be a Bill G. [Microsoft chairman and chief software architect Bill Gates] and the lawyers' decision.'"

The remainder of the eWeek article: Microsoft Won't Bundle Desktop Search with Windows, offers more coverage of the http://www.cyberposium.com/index.asp with comments from Yahoo!, Google, and Xerox representatives. Topics include local, paid, desktop, and enterprise search.

Here are a couple of key quotes from the article:

At Yahoo, we think of local search as an extension of vertical search," [Bradley] Horowitz said. "It reaches into a different business model and provides a tremendous amount of value."

Microsoft's approach is a bit different, Kroese said. "At Microsoft our heritage is being a platform and our approach to search will not be a lot different."

"Today, paid [search] is a great business model," said Microsoft's Kroese. "But we're also pursuing other business models."

Google's [Deep] Nishar emphasized that "advertising is not necessarily evil." He noted that 40 percent of Internet search queries are commerce-specific queries. Charging advertisers for placement is not unethical, he said.